Re: Major vendors changing U+1F52B PISTOL �� depiction from firearm to squirt gun

[Ken Whistler via Unicode]

On 5/23/2018 8:53 AM, Abe Voelker via Unicode wrote:
> As a user I find it troublesome because previous messages I've sent 
> using this character on these platforms may now be interpreted 
> differently due to the changed representation. That aspect has me 
> wondering if this change is in line with Unicode standard conformance 
> requirements.
>

The Unicode Standard publishes only *text presentation* (black and 
white) representative glyphs for emoji characters. And those text 
presentation glyphs have been quite stable in the standard. For U+1F52B 
PISTOL, the glyph currently published in Unicode 10.0 (and the one which 
will be published imminently in Unicode 11.0) is precisely the same as 
the glyph that was initially published nearly 8 years ago in Unicode 
6.0. Care to check up on that?

Unicode 6.0: https://www.unicode.org/charts/PDF/Unicode-6.0/U60-1F300.pdf

Unicode 11.0: https://www.unicode.org/charts/PDF/Unicode-11.0/U110-1F300.pdf

What vendors do for their colorful *emoji presentation* glyphs is 
basically outside the scope of the Unicode Standard. Technically, it is 
outside the scope even of the separate Unicode Technical Standard #51, 
Unicode Emoji, which specifies data, behavior, and other mechanisms for 
promoting interoperability and valid interchange of emoji characters and 
emoji sequences, but which does *not* try to constrain vendors in their 
emoji glyph designs.

Now, sure, nobody wants their emoji for an avocado, to willy-nilly turn 
into a completely unrelated emoji for a crying face. But many emoji are 
deliberately vague in their scope of denotation and connotation, and the 
vendors have a lot a leeway to design little images that they like and 
their customers like. And the Unicode Standard does not now and probably 
never will try to define and enforce precise semantics and usage rules 
for every single emoji character.

Basically, it is a fool's game to be using emoji as if they were a 
well-defined and standardized pictographic orthography with unchanging 
semantics. If you want stable presentation of content, use a pdf 
document or an image. If you want stable and accurate conveyance of 
particular meaning -- well, write it out in the standard orthography of 
a particular language. If you want playful and emotional little 
pictographs accompanying text, well, then don't expect either stability 
of the images or the meaning, because that isn't how emoji work. Case in 
point: if you are using U+1F351 PEACH for its well-known resemblance to 
a bum, well, don't complain to the Unicode Consortium if a phone vendor 
changes the meaning of your message by redesigning its emoji glyph for 
U+1F351 to a cut peach slice that more resembles a smile.

--Ken


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